Lausanne also has plans for an M3 Line and also has a high quality suburban line known as the LEB which connects to Metro underground at Lausanne’s main station!

70K/day for the population of that area and the size of the system is impressive. It's close to the LA Metro at 74K/day.

When I saw the thumbnail, I thought 'Well, that's weird, looks like Lausanne...". So happy you covered Lausanne's 'metro' system! It's a very popular mode of transportation! At rush hour, it's always packed. I think they are thinking of making a M3 line at some point now.

The Lausanne M2 has more daily riders on average than Chicago's Brown Line did in 2019. That's a LOT considering the Brown Line is the 3rd busiest route in a city of 2.7 million.

The then-still-quite-new M1 (although it hadn't been named that yet, it was known as the TSOL) became a bit of a transit life-saver one summer in the early/mid 90s when a chemical tanker train derailed in the western station throat of Lausanne. The risk of explosion shut the main line for days (and caused the evacuation of surrounding buildings as I recall), and all trains to and from Geneva had to terminate at Renens. Passengers for Lausanne, and Sion, Brig, and the Simplon line to Italy beyond, could change at Renens and hop on the TSOL to get to Lausanne itself. That was the first time I ever rode the line.

Found myself in Lausanne this summer when our Swiss friends wanted to take their boat out for a spin on Lake Geneva. Was extremely surprised when walking around the city and seeing a metro sign. I just had to go take a ride and I was surprised how much it reminded me of the Rennes metro Line A

The M1 line at peak hours have frequencies up to every 5 minutes, even though the line is almost only single track (even not every station is double track).

I live in a city (Utrecht) that is basically of the same size and population as the urban area of Laussanne, and we have a lightrail network of similair size to this metro network, but it gets not even a third of the ridership. These numbers are impressive!

Please please please do a video on the Montreux-Glion-Rochers-de-Naye railway and the other systems in the Montreux area all the way to Blonay. It’s an agglomeration of small picturesque towns climbing upon steep hills criss crossed by funiculars and rack railways seemingly very well connected. It’s like a miniature metropolitan area with a miniature metro system. It’s dense and quirky, a very fine example of Swiss railways excellence.

This reminds me, it would be cool to see a video of different transit ticketing systems. Because one great thing that Switzerland's public transport system has that's kind of under the radar is the nationally integrated ticketing system. As a foreigner in Switzerland this has been one of the most impressive parts of it. For example, I recently traveled from my local bus stop in southern Switzerland to a metro stop on Lausanne's M1 line. All I needed to do for tickets was to type in the name of my bus stop as the origin and the name of the metro stop as the destination into the SBB (Swiss federal railways) app. It then sold me a single ticket that was valid for a bus ride to my local train station, a train to a station where long-distance trains stop, two long-distance trains, and finally the trip on the Lausanne Metro. You can also buy tickets to many boats and even some ski lifts from the app! Also, there are no fare gates almost anywhere - tickets are checked only on an inspection basis, which makes getting on the trains incredibly convenient.

As others have pointed out, the M1 used to be called the TSOL (Tramway du Sud Ouest Lausannois). It was renamed when the M2 opened. The TSOL was built out of necessity as Lausanne is a city with 140k inhabitants but has both the EPFL (federal) and UNIL (cantonal) schools which outgrew their premises and decided to relocate in a field out of town. Initially, city planners tried to absorb the need of transport with many bus lines. That's why EPFL was built around a central alley with large bus stops. However, they quickly understood that this would not scale as there are more than 25k students attending the 2 schools today. A light train line was identified as a potential solution but the reason it is single lane with many level crossings is due to the Swiss democratic process. Such "large" infrastructure projects are often submitted to the popular vote. Therefore, to increase the chances for being accepted the costs were kept to the minimum. Thanks to optimised placement of the passing loops, they were able to keep the frequency at 5 min during peak hours though. As many things in Switzerland, the metro system was the result of a long series of compromises.

I live in Brescia, a City in Italy that has a population of around 200000 and has a single line metro (although it will be integrated with trams in the future) While it didn't beat any ridership records, it was a relatively colossal Investment in trying to cure the city's chronic addition to cars. So in a sense I think even small cities should be ready to invest in good transport even if not really profitable.

The moment I saw the thumbnail I already knew what city you were talking about. Lausanne is such a beautiful city with great public transport.

I love this city, it has everything of an important metropolis while being in fact quite small, the metro, the urbanity, the nightlife (good for its size), of course the lake and the mountains nearby, so glad to study there ! Vive Lausanne et la Suisse

Hi, I’m currently living in Lausanne and I take the metro along my way to and from my school. It’s indeed very small like you said, and usually everything is quite efficient. I like the metro as due to a small city like Lausanne, going in between stations is relatively quick. Though, it can be very claustrophobic! Generally, it’s just the metro to me! Funny to see a video about where I am living and about a general aspect of my life!

As a local🇨🇭, the most important thing isn't really the metro but the public system as a all, you can jump out the train in the middle of Lausanne take te metro to the last stop and take the bus to go in the country side and you won't be waiting a lot at the station.

Lausanne has them all. M2 (+M3)Ruber Tired Metro, high floor light rail M1, medium floor metre gauge LEB, the future low floor tram, and Trolleybus

You forgot the '3rd metro line'- the LEB. Also a key success point of the metro in integrated ticketing.

I don’t know if you have done a video on it, but another small city with a metro line to look at is the Lille metro. It has two lines that are fully automated, which work really well…when it works at all! I visited the city a few years back and it was one of the more interesting aspects of the city.

I was in Lausanne with my family, we rode the metro, and it was a nice experience! Every station had a unique sound!

1:45 You said the frequency is around 10min, but that's on Sundays and in the evening. During rush hour it actually is only 5min, and 7.5 the rest of the day. It's often not really on time but the headway is almost always well respected. Which is pretty impressive because of the relatively long stretches of single tracks in some places (especially between Montelly and Malley)! Also concerning the M2, the ridership has increased a little. In 2017 it was around 82,000 daily people. It probably is even more today. To accommodate for that change they even increased the frequency to 2min during rush hour!

could you do a video about CEVA rail in Geneva, and the "voie verte" above it? its a pretty insane project: Part of the existing rail line was moved into a shallow cut-and-cover tunnel, and they build a bikepath+pedestrian path above it, which would have not been possible without the tunnel. It also connects a former isolated railline to the east directly with geneva main station, like a RER line

The M1 is a metro without being one because when it was made it was considered a tram, not a metro (his name was TSOL "Tramway du Sud-Ouest Lausannois"). After they have built the second line M2, that was a real metro system, they renamed the TSOL as M1 so to have two metro lines and an uniform naming. Now they are building a new M3 to complete the city coverage (tram or metro? depends on how you look at it).

That's fun, following your channel for some time and seeing you cover the "metro" I take every day to work. :) Nice overview by the way. A third line is beeing planned, and even if construction has been delayed somewhat, a line M3 will serve the north-west area of town.

Lausanne Metro actually does have steel wheels that run on a normal track and it’s rubber tires on extra wheels help it get up steep hills at a steady 60 kph

I love the Lausanne metro (and the city in itself) it is surprisingly more than adequate for a city this size! Thank you for this video

I do find it quite weird that a city with around the same population as Kelowna, BC or Telford, UK has 2 'metro' lines but it's really interesting and cool.

Lausanne is very busy city despite its size (Olympics Comitee, international organizations, 2 Universities and congested city centre). Also there is very little parking space even for European standards, so without this system it would be very hard to commute.

Sounds much better than the MetroLink we have in St. Louis (that is also light rail). Like, we have way less stops with less frequent trains. 15-30 minute headways depending on day of the week/holidays and time. And that goes out into the counties, so our service population is over a million.

I think Pittsburgh is the smallest city in the USA that has a rail transit system. But it is archaic and needs to be modernized. During the PRR days, pittsburgh had several trolley lines that linked up with intercity trains. Now it only has 2 trolley lines and 2 intercity trains at odd hours. Faster, Modernized, and more frequent Passenger Trains (including Sleepers) to Mid atlantic and great lakes cities would help.

The smallest US city with a subway / metro is Camden, NJ. With a population of 71,700 it's part of the 14 mile (22.5 km) PATCO Speed Line between Center City Philadelphia and Lindenwold, NJ. Originally it was part of the Delaware River Bridge Line, run by PTC and briefly SEPTA between 1936 and 1968. PATCO took over in early 1969. Run by the Delaware River Port Authority (similar operation to NY and North Jersey's PATH system) Camden stops are located at City Hall, Broadway (the Walter Rand Transportation Center) and Ferry Ave. Camden is also served the NJ Transit River Line Light Rail running from the Camden Waterfront to Trenton, NJ. It's a one-zone fare. It's $1.60 each way and for seniors, children, Military or disabled 75 cents. The River Line opened in 2004 and the rolling stock is Diesel powered.

I live in Lausanne and take the M2 every single day, several times a day. I used to take them M1 as a student as well. What makes it interesting is the bit between Flon and Bessiere. Instead of going in a straight line, they chose to connect 2 popular places (Flon and Riponne), making the line do some kind of an S. Not the most efficient timewise but super useful for transit within the core center. The stops are also fairly close to each other in the center, you could walk, but due to the atypical geography of Lausanne, it's just easier to ride the M2. It's too crowded during rush hours though and there is no way to increase capacity, you'd have to enlarge the stations, which sounds like a crazy idea. The only thing they can do is increase frequencies but it's already at 2-3min during rush hours between the main station and La Sallaz. Can't wait for M3 to be operational, it can't come soon enough. But with the current fiasco of the renovation of the main station.... *rolls eyes*

I love these shorter videos. You tell all there is to be told about these smaller metros, so it fits nicely. Well done!

Can you talk about the Rennes Metro? It is the smallest city in the world to have two metro lines, with a new type of automated metro!

My dad worked both on Lyon metro and Lausanne's metro. The inclination of lausanne in some stations is insane !

At some point you should really do a similar video about the Italian city of Brescia which has a Copenhagen style metro while being even smaller than Lausanne

I think you might have talked about it as part of other videos, but I'll highlight the Automated Light Metro of Brescia (196k) with 13,7 km of track, 17 stations and ~50k daily ridership. Overall, a similar situation to Lausanne, minus the mountains.

Lausnne is my favorite city of Switzerland; with or without "metro".

Never knew that was a metro in Lausanne, interesting and lovely video.

I'm so glad you made an episode about Lausanne! I suggested it in a comment a few months ago; I wonder how much influence that had. It's an infrastructure-interesting and very beautiful city in general, so if you haven't been there yourself, I hope you get to go soon.

Line M2 is certainly fascinating. Prior to the modernisation it featured a most unusual single-track, single-car shuttle between the two lower stations, running parallel to the main service and the second station was at a higher level to the other. Interesting that they're building a new tunnel at the lower end though... I didn't know that. Anyway, assuming I get to Geneva at some point in the near-ish future, I'll certainly travel to Lausanne just to try it out. BTW, regarding unusual systems, I'll just say: Glasgow Subway!

Meanwhile my city has 300k people and growing rapidly and not only does it have no metro, there's 45 minute headways on buses. The bus network coverage is actually really good so if headways were reduced to 15 minutes or less, then it'd be usable on a daily basis.

A city set in natural beauty of relatively compact dimensions serviced by great & frequent transit. Plus great chocolate? What’s not to like!

I live in the region :) Happy to see it here

I suspect that being automated is a significant factor in its success. With drivers, I don't think that you could afford the frequency, and lower frequency would mean lower ridership.

Wow I predicted from the title that you will be talking about Lausanne. I was there once, and for a city that size, I was surprised to see a metro! Thats why Lausanne was my first thought.

Finally, an actual small city and not a medium sized one like Oslo or Helsinki.

Fascinating transit lines, looking forward to exploring them in April along with Zurich.

Very nice! You should note some of the places that M1 and M2 covers. The reason M1 has such ridership is because it connects people to two important educational institutions - EPFL (where I am at right now) and next door UNIL. UNIL itself has three stations on M1! In addition, I have friends who take the metro every day from Renens, the terminus station, into Ecublens where EPFL is located to study. M2 basically connects the important places in the city such as the lake, the university hospital (CHUV), the train station and the city center where the two metro lines meet (Lausanne-Flon). In addition to the Lausanne Metro Line you should also cover the Réseau express régional vaudois (RER Vaud) which is a regional train station in the canton of Vaud where Lausanne is in. I take that train every couple of days to go into city center, and it’s just always an absolutely wonderful experience.

I love your channel you as you cover metro systems people might otherwise be unaware of.

I love Lussane. I was just about too book a trip to Switzerland when this popped up

catchin strays out here in Austin, TX. sick commentary though, as always.

I live in Lausanne and you just forgot one thing to mention is that a "new" line will be created the M3. It's just 5 bew station but it'll likely increase a lot the ridership as it'll pass in a crowded area

Lausanne has about 140'000 people. But I understand that a lot of people fail to distinct between city and urban area. It would be nice to clarify when talking about city sizes though.

I can remember when i've been to lausanne one time ( i'm a swiss person) and it was such a weird experience, if you call it metro or not it's a unique experience riding on this transport vehicle uphill!

Had to pause and add to the list of places to go at 3:09. Incredible

Great video, didn't expect a video being made on the metro line of my small swiss town!

Loved it. Thank you!

I take this metro everyday going to work

That's so weird to consider Lausanne as a "small" city for me, even considering cities that have rail transit in Europe.

You might want to know about the following situation. In Bucharest, there are 4 metro lines, built before 1989 in a dictatorship-like work regime. There is still room for expanding it, and the foremost plan was to build the 5th line across some neighbourhood with a significant population, which has a distinctive road going all around it. The other end of this line was to be on the other side of Bucharest, but they found it easier (”safe for work”) to chop the line into smaller segments that they would build one at the time (more than one at a time may have been too straining). So, they got working on the first segment of this line, which is completed as of now. The thing is, it only has one connection with the rest of the system, at one of its ends. If it was completed, it would have by itself several tens of thousands of travels per day, adn it would cross the rest of the system in multimple points, but now it only has 10k/day or less. So, there is one line which could carry 1000 people at a time, but it only carries 30 (as I witnessed), and momentarily requires to change/switch even 2 times to get to some places such as the northern zone, where many corporate buildings (with the jobs they accomodate) are. It is enough to look out for a map of the Bucharest metro to see that neither does it look like it could serve more than 10k a day. By the way, neither is the administration preparing now to work to expand his 5th line and make it useful, because they thought that they need first to add another station to another line.

Lyon mentioned! Merci :)

You should also talk about the automatic mini metro in Perugia, a cool Italian city with less than 180k inhabitants

I suggest a video about Tyne and Wear metro. It’s also 2 lines but it has a weird shape where one of the lines passes the same station twice and it has a pretty good coverage of Tyne and Wear agglomeration with 60 stations. It is more metro-ish with just a few level crossings and fully isolated in the other parts of the track also featuring underground tunnels and cool metro bridges. It’s also interesting how despite having 12 min frequency on each line, they managed to get 3 min frequency on peak at the main shared sections with extra trains running and how they used a lot of existing infrastructure to create this system

There’s also M3 on the way! More cities should adopt that light metro system

I've been on the Lausanne metro, I absolutely love it

i wish more smaller cities did this... i envy the people who live there

I was there a couple of times, lausanne is super steep. Like you are in your ground floor apartment and you see the 5 or more floor on the building below. Think of it of a steeper montreal.

To understand, why this metro line M2 is that successful, you should consider that not only this metro line is steep, but also the roads within the city. And most main streets go up and down the hills in a zig-zag-pattern. So going up the city in a bus took a lot of time before the opening of M2. This line was planned as spine and lifeline of the hole public transport system. It's an integrated and through connected transport system. So, much of the bus lines now start at one of the metro M2 stations, and do not anymore the hole up-and-down to the main train station. Even by taking to different modes of transport, you will safe time, as the M2 goes straight upwards. The M2-line in Lausanne goes from 373 meters over sea level up to 711 Meter over sea level (measured in swiss reference national height network). So the M2 means a huge saving of time, but also a huge saving in men power, or in bus kilometers. And that explains pretty much its success.

We travelled on this a few days ago. Very clean and efficient!

You should have a look at the village metro in Serfaus in Austria, this is not a place you would expect to find a metro line. It was recently upgraded too. This would top Lausanne easily…

Miami Metro has its own issues leading to its poor ridership but I'm glad you even mentioned it. When I posted my video of it years ago the comment sections was unanimously saying "Miami has a metro? That HAS TO BE new! I didn't exist in 1984 when I was there." Ironically 84 was the year it opened lol.

Crazy and beautiful!

Great video. Second small town video I see on this channel.

I was there too ❤ it’s an amazing system great video

I find your videos very gripping and enjoyable. thank you!! Looking forward to seeing Moscow's metro system Explained from you It is a very unique system with a lot of interesting features, being one of the biggest and most loaded transit systems in Europe. As for me, it is one of the best examples of a transit system based on loop lines and radius lines. Best wishes from Moscow!

I was a bit irritated in the first glance, because I wrongly understood Luzon instead of Lausanne. It's a nice video about a small but efficient metro network. 🖐👴

Based on that thumbnail (the mountains and the water) and that title, I was CONVINCED this video was about Port Moody.

Excellent video and great public transport system.

Loving the content Reece. Was wondering if you could do a vid on Brisbane's Busway network and future plans for the BRT 'Brisbane Metro'

On small metros with steep grades, would be interesting to get a video about Naples with its one (or more?) metro lines, funiculars, and weird regional rail lines

There are a lot of things to take into consideration when offering a subway system expecting people to use it. It is not only a great service that will bring riders.

Wow wow wow wow. 😯😻

This is amazing! I had no idea such a thing even existed

Amazing Metro in Lausanne. Wow. Soon there will be M3

I was there in June. Some of the M2 stops have fun audio “themes” to queue you as to which stop the car is approaching. Once the segment with single track is converted to double track, will that make Lausanne the smallest city with a true metro?

On the point of rail naming nomenclature, at this point, I've seen enough metro/subway/light rail/etc. that fall on fringe cases (by virtue of frequency, train types, route design, etc.) that I think it's safer to just call a railway a commuter/suburban/high speed/etc. rail instead. Thanks for the informative video as always! P.S.: this line reminds me a bit of the Shintetsu Arima Line.

You finally talked about our tiny metro :)

The small-ish city of Rennes in France, also with a population of around 200,000 also has two metro lines, which is quite great

beautiful city

The fact that it’s a tram system called ‘metro’ and on a small hilly beautiful city reminds me of the ‘metro’ in Porto

Buenos aires despite having a small length compared to other metros in latin america and the world, has a very dense, paris like, station spacing. To add that, buenos aires city centre has urban densities of up to 45 thousand people per square km and the population of the city doubles during the day because of the people from the adjacent conurbation. Line C for example, despite having 4.3 kms of length, is used by over 250 thousand people per day, making it busiest that M2 in Laussane, tough to be fair, buenos aires city has 2 million people and the greater buenos aires area over 15 million

Finally an actually small city

Being drunk on one of the M2 steep metro stations is a whole nother level of drunkenness, do recommend

Wow! I didn’t know there’s only 1 metro in Switzerland!

Thank you for making these videos. You should do Athens metro too. Lately, it got expanded and a 4rth line is coming up. The "1rst line" dates back to the 19th century.

1:19 that Cap Metro callout tho 😳

Awesome video!! Just a heads up Lausanne is not even 150k people, which makes this metro system even more impressive!

People in Toronto make fun of the Sheppard Subway line (the "stubway") but it's almost identical in both length and daily passengers as the metro line in this video!

There’s is a second metro ( the M3) that is expected to be built for 2031